Providence Lamp-Post, Feb. 20

6th-8th Grade Spelling Bee Tomorrow, Feb. 21 at 3:45

Meet in room 247 for a fierce battle of letters and composure. You’ve nothing to lose and (possibly) a gift card to gain!

Supporters and fans are welcome.

Bell County Museum Field Trip for Lower School March 3rd

Join your friends right down the road from 11:00am-12:30pm as the museum highlights some of our history topics for this semester. The Pioneer House exhibit, Chisholm Trail monument, Gault exhibit, and History of Bell County presentations will be geared toward 1st-4th graders, but siblings and younger students are welcome as well. Parents, please attend with your children and plan to meet at 10:45. There is no cost for this field trip.

Providence Prayer Team Meets February 21st

Meet in the library meeting room near the Pearl Street foyer after chapel for a time of scripture-based prayer for our teachers, students, and school.

Conference Week Next Week

It’s hard to believe that we are approaching the middle of the semester! While conferences for mid-second semester aren’t required, you may want to meet with your child’s teacher for a more in-depth look at how he is doing academically. Please email your child’s teacher if you would like to set up a face-to-face meeting.

Stay & Play this Thursday

Younger siblings of Providence students are invited to come with their parents to play on the school playground after morning chapel from 8:30 till 9:30. (Weather Permitting)Moms interested in assembling a Preschool Busy Bag for your child during this time please RSVP to Sarah Billman at sarah.billman@provprep.org. $2 covers the supplies for a shape activity. We will assemble them on the playground while the kids play.

Spring Boxtop Competition Ends This Friday

Time is up! Please send in all your boxtops by this Friday to be counted for this round of competition. Thank you!

Naturally, these questions are asked more frequently when students hit the “pert” years of Logic School, like 7th and 8th grades. But even adults will find themselves asking such questions, for something or other.

So here are two ways to answer these questions. There are certainly other ways to respond, but here, for now, are two.

One answer is that students don’t really know what it is that they need to know. Very few of us realize what our life’s work will be while a child or adolescent. In fact, many grown-ups are still wrestling with what they want to be when they grow up. And when we finally figure it out (at least for a while), a rich, broad education, based on the time-tested classical curriculum, gives us a strong foundation. The poet and critic T.S. Eliot considers in his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture:

“[A] fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small number of students this is in the main right. Even at a very early stage of school life, we can identify a few individuals with a definite inclination towards one group of studies or another. The danger for these unfortunate ones is that if left to themselves they will overspecialize, they will be wholly ignorant of the general interests of human beings.

“We are all in one way or another naturally lazy, and it is much easier to confine ourselves to the study of subjects in which we excel. But the great majority of the people who are to be educated have no very strong inclination to specialize, because they have no definite gifts or tastes. Those who have more lively and curious minds will tend to smatter. No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”

That last note — that to be educated means to interest in ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude — leads into a second answer to the question “Why do I need to learn this?”:

The love of learning is a process. Sometimes a long process.

The great rewards that come from learning are not usually immediate, and sometimes the process takes years of grunt work before the payoff happens. The student struggling through pre-algebra may one day experience an epiphany in college calculus, which leads to a career in civil engineering. The 6th grader who bears through Shurley grammar may one day be able to enjoy the complex syntax of Shakespeare. In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis writes this about the sometimes painful process of learning to enjoy Greek poetry:

“An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that be becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.”

But Lewis’s point is in fact a bigger one concerning the Christian journey. The process of learning a subject like Greek is in a way like the discipleship process here on earth:

“The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”

In Providence’s “Educational Philosophy,” there are a couple of great sentences about this idea: “Difficult academic work also prepares us for a life of faith by modeling that life in microcosm: rigorous learning requires a belief that the object of understanding–which is not seen and for which we must, at times, wait patiently–will nevertheless be grasped if we continue to hope for it. And we must demonstrate that hope through the good works of study and concentration and discipline.”

So “Why should I learn this?” The answer may be more important than you think.

BIBLE/CHAPEL

SING: Hymn of the week: Amazing Grace

PRAY:

Focus Country of the Week: Belize

Challenges for prayer: While many Belizeans are professing Christians, there are some “false gospels” in and around the church: superstitions, Mayans with their paganism, and the Garifuna, from the island nations, with their black magic. They all need a sensitive presentation of the true gospel.

Scripture Memory: Romans 3:22b-24: There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, [23] for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, [24] and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Can you remember any part of the Lord’s Prayer? (Your children may have memorized this at some point. If they don’t know it, try saying a few words on each line to see if they can say the rest. A good way to memorize this passage of Scripture is to write it on a whiteboard, and, each time you say it, erase a word so that your children have to fill in the blank.)

When you ask God for your daily bread, what are you asking for? (When you ask for your daily bread you are asking God to provide the food you need for today. But more than our food, we should ask God for everything we need, like our food, clothes, water to drink, a warm house in the winter, etc)

What does God want us to do when people sin against us? (God wants us to forgive them.)

What does it mean to forgive someone who sins against you? (When we forgive others for sinning against us, we are saying that we will not hold their sin against them and not make them pay by punishing them for what they did.)

How did Jesus make a way for us to be forgiven for our sins? (Jesus left his place as God the Son in heaven, became a man, and suffered and died on the cross so we could be forgiven and brought into God’s family.)

If you were one of the lepers of the story and suddenly you were healed, what is one of the first things you would want to do? (Parents, help your children connect to the emotional side of the story. Think about it: these lepers had not been allowed to touch their children or their spouses for as long as they had been sick–maybe many years. They would have wanted to go to the priest, and then quickly find their families to give them hugs and kisses.)

What did the leper who returned to Jesus do on his way back? (The leper came back to Jesus praising God.)